Samsung S8500 Wave

This isn't just another 'and me' Samsung phone – it's crammed to the hilt with high end features, such as HD video recording, a 1GHz Samsung-own Hummingbird processor, a super-slim chassis, the latest Super AMOLED screen and multi-touch support right out of the box.

.The Samsung Wave is rocking the TouchWiz UI on top of Samsung's new Bada OS, which is meant to make most of its range into smartphones with access to its own app store.

The screen is truly gorgeous. It is a special “super” AMOLED style that not only is brighter, but uses less battery juice. You have sixteen million colors, multi-touch ability, scratch-resistant surface, all contained in 480 by 800 pixels. That is a superior resolution for a screen that is 3.3 inches in size. All that adds up to a joy for the eyes to behold.

This phone uses the GSM quad band networks and dual band HSDPA networks for carriers. It has WLAN ( Wi-Fi ) in the faster “N” mode. The speed differences in the earlier Wi-Fi modes are another reason why the Samsung Wave S8500 is so fast. Bluetooth, microUSB ( 2.0 ) EDGE networks and GPRS/HSPA are available with this smartphone.The browser is pretty good, it loads pages quickly and offers pinch and double-tap zooming. Switching aspect (portrait to landscape) is also rapid thanks to the on-board motion sensor, and dragging the page around the screen is smooth. You can also have multiple pages open and setting up bookmarks for quick browsing is a breeze.

Internal memory is available in a two gigabyte or eight megabyte configuration with a 32 gigabyte microSD card slot being thrown in for truckloads of space for video, music, or what have you.

Keyboards are offered in portrait and landscape aspects. The screen size means the portrait QWERTY keyboard is a little small, but we still found it easy enough to type one-thumbed. In landscape mode we could happily bash out messages with two thumbs.

Good camera performance is paired with the offering of HD (1280 x 720) video capture at a solid 30fps. Performance is good for sharing online, although also suffers with blowing out highlights.

As a media device, though, the Samsung Wave shows real promise. Out of the box you get BBC iPlayer support (for UK readers) and support for a number of different video formats, including DivX, XviD, MKV, MP4, Real and WMV; we had success with some AVIs too. If you enjoy watching video content on your phone, then the Wave might be for you as the screen really impresses and you don't necessarily have to transcode everything, as it happily played back some 720 MPEG4 footage from a pocket camcorder.

Battery life is rated at 7 hours of talktime over 3G. We found the battery was pretty good.